User:Dagmar d'Surreal

Me

Normally I focus my efforts on Dropline GNOME, but I also am a MythTV user and long-experienced Linux administrator and all-around screwdriver jockey. This means that yes, I am one of the extreme minority running MythTV on Slackware, but more on that below. I write very little (read: zero if I can help it) C++ code, and primarily what I can do is make MythTV "go" but I know quite a bit about X, display hardware in general (excepting ATI), and have learned quite a bit about the Hauppauge PVR-xxx series cards through the use of my PVR-500 with MythTV. I will be honing, fixing, clarifying, and elaborating on any and all sections of the wiki that appear to be imprecise or unclear as I encounter them.

If you are attempting to get MythTV working on Slackware, I may be able to save you a great deal of time. Check http://dagmar.droplinegnome.org/slackware/MythTV and you might find a reasonably up-to-date set of packages that will run on Slackware 12.0 (at the present time, July 4th 2008, you'll find nothing, but they're almost ready for production status). Pay attention to the comments at the bottom of that page for any last-minute information I might have thrown in. If the packages there are missing or apparently stale, track me down on the IRC channel (#MythTV-users, or anywhere on irc.freenode.net) and you can at least get the ones I'm using (which are most of the time going to be the same as what I have posted to that site). Some caveats to be aware of...

Lirc is not the sort of thing that can be easily packaged (for many reasons) and the package there (if it exists) is primarily a placeholder and a means of installing a build script so that the package may be rebuilt to suit the needs of the local user without polluting the packaging database.

The same holds true for any ivtv driver packages I might have up there, although at some point that package will (note: future tense, not present tense) be replaced with one that (if you have your configured kernel source still on the system) will automatically recompile itself on the next boot if you upgrade your kernel.

The Qt package in there should be binary-compatible with Slackware's default Qt package. You probably won't need it, but like the LIRC package it's there in case you need to customize it or build it in a non-standard way.

MythWeb will receive a bit of beating on and a custom Apache package to make the thing "just work" is currently "in progress". At the moment, it is a fairly vanilla compile which puts the files in a place Slackware's httpd does not look by default.

Beyond that, you can find my email address rot13'd in the Changelog.Dropline files if you but look in any of those packages, so you can ask me questions, report packaging issues, etc.

The build scripts wedged into the packages are not meant to (and can't) be used directly. They are meant to be invoked by the global build script that is part of the Dropline build system, which is basically a rapid prototyping engine for packages which eliminates as many of the dull and repetitive tasks of package building (like setting permissions, putting files in the proper places, setting CFLAGS, etc).

Big caveat: I have little tolerance for people asking for "help" which amounts to "read to me because I'm too lazy". You have been warned. For most everything else, I'm astonishingly agreeable because I know this stuff is a massive pain to set up the first time.

Basically, it was time to break some equipment out of the exceedingly whoosy box I was using as a frontend and push those drives out into their own box in the study as a dedicated fileserver. The motherboard, CPU, RAM (it's overkill, but I couldn't really buy less than 1Gb) and case came to just a hair over $300, after shipping and taxes.

Notes:

Currently core speed on the CPU should be >=2.4 for HD, because it's the core speed that matters most to us--not the PR rating for the CPU.

Core speed also matters because X2's seem to only do even-decimaled clock multipliers, meaning 2.3Ghz would result in the RAM not being used at full speed (80% certain).

The motherboard has one serial port, which isn't in the connector cluster on the rear--it's actually a 9 pin header on the motherboard, so the serial transciever can be mounted internally (with a bit of judicious drilling on the front of the case).

Caveat:

At the time I bought it it looked like the 7050PV chipset on the motherboard was going to be able to do all the hardware acceleration needed once the drivers caught up, but this has turned out to not be the case. Aim for something with an 8300/8400/8600 integrated chip if you want a shot at VDPAU support for HD content playback.